Fiction
Miss DU MAURIER'S latest novel has moved me to look up what I thought about her twenty years ago. Of The Loving Spirit I wrote
" She has a fine sense of structure, and her imagination moves - surely to the realisation of great issues. In detail, however, it fails her, sometimes pitifully. Her village folk are a bad give- away. They speak a bastard, poetic lingo, part Irish, part Cornish, and wholly arts-and-crafts. . . .This is a fault, not of observation, but of imagination."
And. I complained that the very excellence of-' the novel in other respects made this laziness, this refusal to come to grips with detail, particularly irritating. A year later, after saying that I'll Never Be Young Again fell into two parts, one admirable, the other quite unreal, I wrote :— "If Miss du Maurier develops on the lines of the first" part of her novel, she will be a portent, blended of Marie Corelli and Hall Caine. If, as I fervently hope, the second part keeps uppermost, there is no saying what she may become. In any case, I have a feeling that a very great number of people are going to be deeply interested and influenced by her future work."
It wasn't a- bad prophecy, about one of the most successful of best-sellers ; and, though Miss du Maurier has developed on both lines, the merits and faults remain. She has reached the happy state when it can no longer matter to her what any reviewer says ; but we may note that My Cousin Rachel has the old virtues, the bold sweep of imagination, the energy, pins a ,narrative skill which is the result of long practice ; and the old faults, the facile, out-of-character lines that disfigure the often excellent dialogue, the laziness over detail, the mixture of careful with perfunctory work. Miss du Maurier deserves her enormous public. Any'professional writer will salute the skill that sets Rachel moving—and sigh to see so many marks of the writer's indifference to her readers.
Mr. Steinbeck is at pains to justify what he calls a play-novelette, .a short novel of which the dialogue makes a play, since each act, Or chapter, keeps to one scene. No justification is needed, provided the result succeeds. Burning Bright has a strong theme, the realisation that none of us can claim to possess a living soul. A child is not yours or mine. It is its own, or all men's. Life is sacred. The most we can do is free it, make a home for it. This lesson, which a great many parents have yet to learn (" I have decided to make my boy a lawyer," &c., &c.) is not made easier or more acceptable by the dialogue in which Mr. Steinbeck's characters indulge. Its embodiment is clear enough. The widower Joe Saul, a circus cloivn in Act One, a farmer in Act Two, a seaman in Act Three, has married a young wife but has no child. • This so distresses him that she is moved to show her love by conceiving someone else's. He finds out, is distraught, but at least accepts with gladness the fact that a child has come. Unfortunately some of the language in which these illuminations are recorded is on a different level from the rest. Friend Ed, fellow clown in Act One, has some odd things to say:
Three years it is since Cathy died. You were strong in your wife-loss."
- "Do I have the friend-right to ask a question, Joe Saul?"
Oddity is not confined to Ed. Mordeen, the young wife, has her share:
" Without that trick you'll go screaming silently in loss." Have I, I wonder, the admirer-right to tell Mr. Steinbeck that this-trick has set me screaming silently in my reader-loss ?
Mr. Batchelor knows a great deal about professional boxing, and at his best he writes with exhilarating energy. For much of the time, however, he is like a certain kind of boxer, advancing and throwing multitudes of punches in the hope that one or two will land. There is some very pleasant dialogue: " The first' boy I ever handled—it was me who suggested he gave itnp and joined the Army. Sure, I could have made thirty a week outa him till the doctors got together on his brainpan. That boy got a fixation' he was-the Holy Ghost when he wasn't no such thing."
There are exciting passages, and punches that land good and hard. But Mr. Batchelor's determination to show his knowledge of the seamy side of boxing and many other things results in a one-sided picture and a rather untidy novel.
Last, and best, comes a book for the connoisseur. I had never heard of Mr. Auchincloss, and, in default of any biographical details on the dust-jacket, I do not know whether The Injustice Collectors is a first book. It is good enough to be a twenty-first. These eight long short-stories are about people who attract or bring _upon themselves their own misfortunes. They can bring them by casting themselves for unsuitable parts, or by taking seriously leads that were only half intended. They can attract them by presenting as it were a cavity for the appropriate mischanCe to fill : by offering themselves unconsciously as victims to the moves of others. My own pick from these alarmingly able stories would be Maud and The Unholy Three, but I should have no quarrel with anyone who pre- ferred any of the others. Mr. Auchincloss sees, and can write. He causes me one provisional misgiving only: I find no trace in him ,of affection for any of his characters. L. A. G. STRONG.
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